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The Land of Pitfalls and Irradiation was barren. No consorts welcomed your arrival, barely a step ahead of the death of your world; when you fought your way past the shambling skeletons of imps to the burned husk of a city in your first week, the small bones of clever birds crunched under your shoes. Magpies of some sort, perhaps, or maybe dinosaurs; you're certain no earthly bird had thumbs.
You could see no stars in the sky at night, no blue light shining from the dull orb of Skaia during the day. The only light came from the sickly green glow of the rocks scattered lightly over the surface of your Land; after a day or so of scrambling around in the darkness, you alchemized yourself a pair of nightvision goggles and started walking.
The writing on the crumbling walls of the abandoned citadels that you found near the equator speak of a sleeping beast, an enormous monster lurking in the heart of the Land. The scrawling pictures of it were in dark blue, nearly invisible against the schorl that must have been the chief building material of the consort-birds. It looked a bit like a snake, if snakes had arching wings and six eyes.
The game must go on; you didn't see the world end in fire to give it up here. You kept going and time kept dragging on seemingly in spite of itself; sometimes you could swear the whole planet creaks like an old house with the strain of it.
The imps and basilisks and litches you fought were nothing but bones. They were hardy and stronger than they should have been this early, and they always died hard. The grist they dropped was meager, but the experience was good; the one thing in this game that came easy was climbing the echeladder. The levels that you gained were the few marks of progress you could keep; everything else, you had no choice but set to use. Your alchemy became a delicate balance of food and weapons, of seeking out ever stronger enemies to kill for their meager grist. It was a tough life, but you were plenty tough yourself. You got by.
And when you dreamt right, you saw your counterpart, wearing glowing gold and red, cloaked with light and luck. Your alpha-self , someone (something?) said slick and cold straight into your thoughts. You wished your counterpart luck as well as you could, and tried your best to bite down your envy. It was nice, to think that some version of you was happy. It gave you hope for yourself, and you needed that when the game got hard.
When you didn't dream right, you opened your eyes somewhere else.
Your dreamself was alone on a ruined, drifting moon, the chain to its planet snapped clean at the end. The sight of its broken arches encircling an enormous sundial stirred something too close to loneliness. You didn't like being there, or being asleep. There was only one tower on the dream-moon, its stones cracked, the deep violet filigree rusting off. Despite yourself, you wondered about what happened to the people who lived and died where you slept. And as hard as you tried, you weren't always a pragmatist.
You walked, sometimes, digging through the rubble of the palaces instead of looking for the visions that came best to you in dreams. In the precarious room at the top the tower, you started your hoard: dusty children's stickers of Dersite heroes with the colors still bright under the grime, tiny purple shards of pottery that caught the light from your trusty flashlight, the rusted skeleton of an iron crown with its gems and gold torn away. They were useless and pretty, and you didn't have much that was pretty when you were awake.
You were alone, far more than your life in the mountains with your Cousin could have ever prepared you for. (The worms that dig through your thoughts hiss and scream. We're always with you, Lordling, never apart. Never, never never let ours go- )
Before the game, your isolation had been by choice. The internet and all its masses of people had been at your fingertips, even if you stupidly hadn't treasured it. You'd kept to yourself, apart from your contributions on a few wikis for mildly embarrassing animated shows and glitch-finding forums for old console games, forming a few precious friendships somewhere along the line. And when you'd gotten your advance copy of SBURB, you'd very nearly played the game with them. You'd thought it'd be more fun, together.
The meteor that knocked out your internet halfway through put a stop to that, of course. You still wondered, sometimes. If HijackingGolem and CriticUnacknowledged and all the rest of them got out alright, if they were in the same purgatory you were. There was nothing else to do when you dreamed but hope for better. For all of you.
When you dreamed and looked for them, when you gritted your teeth against the sounds in your ears and combed the threads that make up the world for things that felt familiar, there were others. Other players with with you- eight, nine, eight-and-one, eight. One flickered in and out of your grip like an image ghosting over a television; you felt an odd sort of kinship, when your eyes seemed to slide away the way your enemies' do on you. ( Void hero, but not null-and-void , something almost laughed in your ear, close enough to make you jump. Always our Rogue, never a Lord. Not like you, not like us . )
The group of them didn't glow with godhood the way your counterpart did, and you caught only half-lit glimpses when you tried to focus on them in your mind with what you supposed were the powers game-given to you. A Witch with wrapped hands, a brightly grinning Knight in dented armor, a Prince with resentful eyes. You didn't feel much for them at all, but sometimes you saw mirrors. ( Windows. True things. ) It was difficult , like trying to see past your reflection into a darkened room. You persevered. The windows were important ; you thought you could almost put a name to them. ( Timeline-doomed, null and void, a session meant for failure .)
They were like you.
There was one in particular you started to hunt for. Quicker and smaller and harder than the others. When you focused on him, you saw double. One stood at your ( not-your ) side, in black and white and gray, and he was a friend, not a god. None of them were. ( You were, could be .) The whispers in your head explained as best they could, through daydreams and watery gurgles. You are the boundary-line, and your blood is the light to mark to their way. Kind Lord, always kind to kith and kin.
The other ( the doomed ) wore the colors of dawn, all yellows and orange and reds. He wore gold in the same sign your counterpart did, and dressed exactly the way that you knew a Rogue would. He smiled, and when you woke up your hands itched where you had tried to close them around his scrawny neck. He'd stolen what was yours, your light and your luck and your happy ending. You spat a bit of dust out, and felt small when you woke up curled in the shadow of an ancient church.
Everything is small in the dark , they told you, the words quiet and terrifyingly clear, not a trace of static.
When you built up enough of a stockpile, you started to travel farther and farther from your home, your backpack heavy with food that had enough preservatives to mummify a small dog. In a moment of impulse, you’d impulse-alchemized a music player and headphones, plastered with your favorite garishly bright cyan and purple animal stickers. You were grateful for it, when you craned your neck to look at the sky and heard the whispers grow louder.
Not alone. Not ever alone, when we're we ( and us ) and you and we are all traveling together. We're in orbit ( dark is where the light isn't ) maybe the game is already over . Will we know ( will you know ) in the dark? But we're still here .
You turned up the cheerful electronica until your ears ached, and ignored the sense that something (someone) was looking back at you. Lord, all journeys are games.
There weren’t many landmarks on your Land, but you became adept at traversing the miles of ravines that outlined it. Some were nothing more than small cracks in the dusty surface, obliterated with an idle kick. Others yawned in front of your feet without warning, meters across and miles deep. The glowing stones that jutted out of the walls cut into your palms at first when you climbed; you wore bandages, then callouses. Your octo-sprite you left at home; you didn't regret its absence, even if it had healed you whenever you were injured on its watch. The sound of its wet breathing when it kept watch while you slept gave you nightmares.
(You had woken up the second night and vomited saltwater that was filled with tiny, clear, eggs when you looked closer. You had wiped your face and told yourself it could be worse; as far as you could tell the eggs hadn't hatched.)
Often, there were pools of water at the bottom of the ravines, still but sterile. It tasted like metal and you almost spat it out, but you didn't get sick and you didn't die. You didn't have to waste grist alchemizing bottles of water anymore, either, and that was enough to endear you to it.
And sometimes, you found writing in little caverns, hidden away just for you. It was always a thrill of victory to find them, more cheering to you than what little knowledge their writing actually imparted. The Lord of empty spaces , one called you, With pearls that were their eyes . It was a bit flattering, in the confusing, terrifying-if-you-let-yourself-think-about-it way that the game has down pat.
The hero that they called you was said to slay the beast of the Land, and you hadn't had a better idea for what to do. Quite a few of entrances of the dungeons you needed to pass through to proceed were glitched irreparably or missing altogether. You got better at being not , at being so disregarded that walls themselves forget to block your way, and you could walk straight through to the graphics past them. It was an alien feeling, but oddly… natural?
You weren't meant to proceed this way, but then the game wasn’t meant to be impossible. You would like to think you and the game had both got an understanding on exactly how cheap you were each prepared to be about this.
It took almost a year, but you made it to the entrance of the mines. The way was boarded and locked, one of the last acts by the consorts that inhabited the Land. They had been able to take the schorl from the gleaming mountains that trace the contours of the Land, but even centuries (millennia? eons?) ago there were no trees, no light. From what you pieced together, the sole source of power had been the uranium that freckled the mantel in rare clumps, the cause of the ominous glow that characterized your Land.
It didn't do you any harm, despite the steady tick of the radiometer that you'd alchemized as soon as you deciphered the name of your Land. You let the atoms reach you, and pass through you unhindered by your delicate organs and DNA. Being able to be unnoticed by the laws of physics could come in handy.
The consorts were less lucky. They had dug, and dug, and dug, and the denizen of the Land had taken notice. She had forced the majority uranium that had remained harmlessly below the surface to the top of the barren soil. For the consorts, it had been a slow death, slow enough for them to leave their wills for you to find. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away . You wasted precious grist on plastic flowers for their mass graves, and kicked yourself for it when you spent the next few nights hungry for it.
With every level you gained and every skill you learned, you came to know more and more deeply that this wasn't right. Dust wasn't disturbed by your passage through the forgotten parts of your Land; your presence hid itself, and your enemies seemed to find it hard to focus on you at all until your fingers were tearing through their throats. You didn't need to alchemize as much, by then; you ripped the nothingness from what you lacked, and dragged it into existence. You knew that you were powerful, now, but it didn't feel like much at all. What had you done with it?
The Land you were given was broken already. The dead had been mourned and buried and long forgotten. There was nothing for you to save, no battle for you pledge your honor to, no chance to do anything with the power you had obtained. As strong and clever and brutal as you knew you could be, nothing about you mattered here at all.
Maybe the game is already over.
You were meant for more than this. More than pointless wandering, than the quests worth less than the tablets they were written on. You were meant to go on an adventure. To make friends and help to lead them to victory. To create something huge and important, and rule it when you won . Why else were you alive? Why else weren't you dead, like everyone else? (Like your Cousin, like your friends, like-)
You walked unhindered through the barriers in front of the mine's entrance. Your shoes didn't leave footprints; light wasn't blocked by you enough to cast a shadow.
Your denizen wasn't asleep.
Nix was larger and greater and more beautiful than you could have ever imagined. She uncoiled gracefully, a sinuous movement that ripples across her glossimer scales and the paper thin skin of her three sets of wings. You'd seen gods in your dreams; you'd been a god in your dreams. Nix was something far older than that. Old as the game (universe) itself. Her eyes focused on you, ripping straight through your cloak of absence, and you knew that you never had a chance of hiding from her.
She asked if you want to make a Choice.
This was the bad option: you could die in this cave, and your death would be the end of this timeline.
This was the worse option: you could die as a sacrifice, and the Void would bring you back.
You ambled your winding, seemingly-aimless way towards the highest point in your Land: a guard tower, neat and circular as a hole in your head, and for the first time in a long while you pushed away the nothingness that lay over you like a cloak. The imps saw you, then, and before long you had a horde of underlings following behind you. For a bit it felt like an honor guard instead of a hunt.
The staircase up the side of the tower seemed endless; you craned your neck to catch a glimpse of the top, to see where you were not, and bent the lack of you there, just a bit. The world shifted, and you were at the top, stumbling over your own feet and falling on your face. This was not your greatest moment.
The top was nearly empty, which wasn't surprising: your Land wasn't exactly overflowing with gifts. The only thing you could see was a slab of deep blue rock in the dead center of the floor, inscribed with tiny pictograms that formed the shape of a circle. It felt powerful, like standing near a live wire- you could almost hear the buzz of power off it.
Your quest bed.
You sat down, and it was more comfortable than cold rock had any right to be. The horde that followed you here was still climbing the enormous staircase; you still had time. Time for… something. You weren't sure. Now that you were here, you weren’t sure of a lot of things.
You pulled your headphones down to hang around your neck and tried to ignore the background noise of clicking bones of the underlings, the static hissing and popping as something far larger than you frantically tried to speak without jaws. The headphones made your ears hurt after too long, after all. It was a startlingly mundane complaint for the last few moments before your death.
-- hydrostaticExitous [HE] started pestering hijackingGolem [HG] --
-- hijackingGolem [HG] is out of planetary range! --
HE: Hello.
HE: i guess it's been a while since i've messaged you.
HE: Didn't really see much of point in messaging people out here if none of them are receiving them.
HE: And i don't think you'll get this one either. Sorry for the doubt, if you are and i've just not been getting your replies.
HE: i'm going to die.
HE: And i think i could stop it. Run, and just… keep surviving out here.
HE: Maybe that's the point. Self-sacrifice, and all that. Not much of a sacrifice if you have no choice, right?
HE: Right.
HE: …
HE: Sorry. i'm not good at smalltalk. i guess i’ll just use you as a sounding board; hope you don't mind.
HE: Nix said that if i died here, i'd come back immortal. And maybe that's true.
HE: She said if she killed me herself, this whole timeline would end and. And that would strengthen the better one of me. The right one.
HE: i wouldn't know.
HE: The underlings are getting closer.
HE:
HE: i'm afraid.
HE: i think if i can do this, i can see things clearer when i look at the void. Figure out an actual plan to win this. Find out why this game is so broken in the first place.
HE: Fix things.
HE: Of course, i might just...
HE: Die.
HE: i guess i'll have to take that chance.
HE: Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, and all that.
HE: Talk to you later, pal.
HE:
HE: You were a good friend.
-- hydrostaticExitous [HE] stopped pestering hijackingGolem [HG] --
You ascended, bloodstained and with your spine broken in three places before it knitted back together. It felt like being frozen, it felt like all the blood in your vein turned to ice and there was nothing left in you that was mortal. It was terrifying, awe inspiring; the Void opened around you, infinite and welcoming and utterly silent.
With a contemptuous twist of your wrist, your tower and corpse and killers vanished. It was a trivial act, for a god. For a L̥̥̯͙̔ͯ̆̎ͭͩͅo̴̰̽̅r̬̦̟̒̑̾͋͒d̤̪ͧ͆͘. The Void consumed them soundlessly, and you admired the graceful, sharp edges of the build foundation that was the only thing left behind.
High above you, you could see straight to the Furthest Ring: the darkness was no longer a veil on your eyes. The curling shapes of your faithful companions gave you headaches trying to trace their ends while spacetimes warped and bent around them. They waved and whispered to you, clearer than ever. Lord, Lord, the liege and the land are one .
Lord, we are all together in the dark . A̮̬͙͓͉͓̔͛ľ͛ͭͨ̐̉̚l̖̱̹͓̬͈͎͑̿̑̑ͮͪ̿ ̏̆҉̪̪̼o̖̖͕̦̞ͩ̄̋̾̊ͨ̄f̟̤̯͔̌ͯ̈̂ ͇̰͓̗ų̳͍̤̳s̴̭͕̟͚̠̮̜̋ͦͦ̉ͪ.͇̼̲̫̺̲̙̑ͥ͒̎͆͛͒.
Gently, you drifted to rest on the edge of one the ravines. Your deep blue cape trailed behind you, weightless and cold. All of your clothes were, the soft blue fabric shedding heat instantaneously, leaving you shivering. It was worth it. You concentrated, and searched through the mirrors of impossibilities, branching off the alpha timeline (the you that should-be, burning and furious and just as much a god as you are now are), searching for the one branch that showed windows of what is. The session that the rest of your friends ended up in, while you were shunted to here.
You sucked your breath through your teeth, friendly black spots dancing at the edge of your vision as you stared clear into another world, at nine planets circling a glowing blue Skaia instead of dead husk of your own; there was strain, in your head, but distant. Muffled. There.
All of them, alive and well. Alive and h̢̧̰̗̟̯̲̜ͦͩ͊̚̚̚a̴̪͇̦̬̖̣͇̭͖͆̽͒̏͢p̴̠̰ͬ̍͊p̭̻̥͇̤ͤ̎̄͊͑́ỳ̼̪͈̳̐̈́.
You cracked your knuckles, and narrowed your eyes as you started your ascent, the curls and tendrils of your r̹͙̖̆̈̿ͩͩe̜̍͗͑ͨà͖̲̼̃l̰̙͔̗̳̺̥̒͌ ͖͈͎͊ͨ̒fͤ̉r̻̞̫̦ͅi̜̬͇̰̜͎͕̿e̗̙̪͓͖̗ͥͅṋ̰̣̮͙̖́ͫ̌͋̍͛̍d͎̳͙͚̪ͩͦ͌͂͛̔s̲̪̲̙̪welcoming you eagerly. There were many paths through the Furthest Rim, if you took the time to find them. As you let the t̨̻͓̯̲e͙̦̻̘͞ͅn̛̺t͓̯̱͈̯a͙c̺̞̪̥͙̱͡l̻͙̙͘ȩ͙̮̱̼͙͚̮ş̥̞̰̰̼͎ͅ curl around you protectively, guiding you, welcoming you to the tangle, you felt one thought remain clear even as everything else begin to become oddly
like
s̫͎̲̗̮̍̍͋̉t̺̰̞̱̜̟͓͈͂̑ͣ̄͆̆̍ͅă̶̪͊̒̓ͯ̈̌́̚t̸̬͉̻͈̱͈͙̯̜ͭ̉̒̄ͩͤ́͟iͨ̄̃̕͏̞̭̖̬̝͓̬̣͚͘c̸̟̟̣͐̅̒̆̎̓̍ͧ͘.
The rogue would live to regret what he'd done to you. Ÿ̟͕̺͐͗ͭ̂̇ͅo̦̣̰͉̮͇͓͂̎ǘ̹̝̐͑̆ ̱̋ͭ̅̅̌wͨ̍̏̄ė̷̦͎͑r͗̚͟ȇ̩͇̪̮͈̠̆̍̍͞ ̤̺͉̞̥͎̂̾ͦ͜g̛o̜͆̿ͥͥ̆͌i̖͉̜ͪͣ́n̖̳̖̣̠ͧ͂̀̅ͭ̄g̨̥͊̑ͫ͒͗ ̮̣̲̲͔̊ͤ͛ͯͬͥ́t͔̗̤̗̫͈͊ͭ̀ͪ̑̎̓o̵̼̼̺̬͎͙̖m̬͉̥̮͖̬̭̝͇̯̭̘͉͉̎̿̇̌̂̒͌͆̿͜͟͠͡a̴̙̟̝̞͍̣̜͎͙̝̦̠͔͈̤̝̗͚̘͋̅ͮ̏̅̃̍̾̆̇͌̌ͨ̒̈́͑ͪͭ̆͞k̶͔̥̠̝̺͍̫̒͋ͣ̇͌̒͂͛͊̚͘e̷̱̮̱̖͔̫͇̱̜ͨͫͯ̒̊̍̈͗̉̿ͩ̅̂̔̐̀̒̚͘͟͝ ̛̬̣͓̜̻͙̖̐̒ͦͨ͆̓̃̇ͮ̑ͮ́̒͋̋̉̀̀͜͝h̡̧̠̞̜̜̬̙̟̼͉̲ͬ̓͗͗̎̌̊́̃ͧ̿͊͐̏͂͗̍ͥ͠͝ͅi̶̝̙̘̠͑̀ͦ̿͑͆̔̐ͤͦ͗̽̆̂ͧ͛ͤ̚̚͠ḿ̶̴̨̱͇̦͓̝̫̟͇͊̌̎ͦ͛ͫ̕ͅ ̱̞̳̖̤̜̫̫͎̰̭̺͖͎̭͔ͥ̇ͯ͢p̶̸̢̟̩̮̣̬͖̦ͪͧ̉̈́ͦ͑͜a̛̤̦͙̰̥͔̱̖͍̦̮̠̹̠̜̟ͭ̂̆ͯ͒͊̄͑̀̄̏̑́́̚͠͡y̧͈̟̹͌͛ͪ̾̋̓͑̉̃̉͑ͫ̉̆ͩͮͮ̄͞ͅ.